October is Marigold

 

Photo by Douglas Claytor

 

Here's a poem by Ted Hughes

 October Dawn

"October is marigold, and yet

A glass half full of wine left out

 

To the dark heaven all night, by dawn

Has dreamed a premonition

 

Of ice across its eye as if

The ice-age had begun its heave.

 

The lawn overtrodden and strewn

From the night before, and the whistling green

 

Shrubbery are doomed. Ice

Has got its spearhead into place.

 

First a skin, delicately here

Restraining a ripple from the air;

 

Soon plate and rivet on pond and brook;

Then tons of chain and massive lock

 

To hold rivers. Then, sound by sight

Will Mammoth and Sabre-tooth celebrate

 

Reunion while a fist of cold

Squeezes the fire at the core of the world,

 

Squeezes the fire at the core of the heart,

And now it is about to start."

-   Ted Hughes,

Here is a poem by Denise Levertov:

"A certain day became a presence to me;

there it was, confronting me--a sky, air, light:

a being. And before it started to descend

from the height of noon, it leaned over

and struck my shoulder as if with

the flat of a sword, granting me

honor and a task. The day's blow

rang out, metallic--or it was I, a bell awakened,

and what I heard was my whole self

saying and singing what it knew: I can."

-   Denise Levertov, Variation on a Theme by Rilke